RAIN & RAINBOWS
Toronto’s gay community mourns and celebrates at Pride
“I couldn’t get down on my knees these days to save my life.”
A comment that had me bursting out in laughter — in church.
Because it was Pride Parade Day, you know, and this gay guy was elderly —
elderly, I say — leaning heavily on his cane. And I thought he was making a ribald joke.
But no, he was referring to the lack of kneelers at the non-denominational Metropolitan Community Church on Simpson Ave., to which the church on Church St. worship service had hastily repaired Sunday because of the deluge outside, washing away the folding chairs and tent stage that had been set up in the heart of Toronto’s Gay Village. How easily we misconstrue. Amid the revelry and the colourful floats, the balloons and thumping music, the glittery drag queens and underwear-clad Adonis men, I went to the service anticipating reflection and perhaps some spiritual direction for a community that has suffered grievously this past year with confirmation that eight of their own, at least, had fallen victim to a serial murderer, a diabolical individual who had preyed on gay males right in the heart of their downtown business and pleasure colony.
Just as the community had believed for ever so long, their concerns dismissed by the police chief and the original task force assembled to investigate the disappearance of several men.
The policing failure is not so simple or tone-deaf as some have angrily, or sadly, declared. But colossal failure it was, all the same.
And lives were lost because the gay community was not put on alert. Shades of the Balcony Rapist investigation from the mid-’80s, in this same general area, where women who fit the victim profile were not told of a sexual predator, so that they could take steps to protect themselves. In that case, police had no doubt they were looking for a particular assailant with a specific M.O. but kept that information close to their vests, ultimately successfully sued by Jane Doe.
Yet at the MCC, there was only brief mention made of the men allegedly slain by Bruce McArthur, in the opening prayer and later sermon.
Odd, to me. Perhaps this was taking the high road in the context of faith, where the focus was love. “In the long run, love always wins,” Rev. Jeff Rock told the congregation.
Theirs was a love, of course, that could not even speak its name in an era not so long ago, a time of bathhouse raids and closeted homosexuals and criminality and fear and a plague that claimed the lives of 22 million people around the world, as estimated by UNAIDS, when diagnosis of HIV/ AIDs was a death sentence.
Incrementally, beginning with the first Pride fest on Toronto Islands in 1971, gays and lesbians — and the ever increasing, somewhat bewildering alphabet soup of LBGTTIQQ2SA — took back their lives and their dignity. Pride Week is now Pride Month, culminating in Sunday’s parade down Yonge St., with 120 groups covering the rain-drenched route.
But not police, at least not as a float participant, not with cruisers cruising, for the second consecutive year, present only for parade duty or as faux-cop caricatures, always a popular get-up. (Over the weekend, in a novelty shop, I found a “gay cop” action figure. Looked exactly like a straight cop action figure.)
I understand the exclusion, which has divided both the straight and gay populace.
It’s a bit much, with the Gay Village horrors so fresh, with the gay constituency rightfully bitter and distrustful and wounded, to expect forgiveness and rapprochement with police. Black Lives Matter coopted the parade in 2016, halting proceedings to present a clutch of demands arising from carding — racial profiling — the over-policing of black communities, and other issues. This is more generically fraught.
Some claim there’s no place for a straight white female in this conversation. But tensions between police and any demographic are everybody’s concern, or should be, even if this debate has been shanghaied by politics and polemics and just so much sophistry, primarily by straight social conservatives all of a sudden getting proprietary about an event, the parade, where I suspect they’d never be caught dead. How weird that queers — more specifically, Pride organizers — are harangued for asserting control over a parade that is still very much their baby, in its 38th iteration.
Chief Mark Saunders did the prudent thing in April, withdrawing the police department’s application for participation, albeit at the Pride executive’s request. A squabble would only further damage relations and harden polarities. This will take time to fix. “The record will show that an application to be in the parade was submitted by the police and it was accepted by Pride,” Toronto Mayor John Tory told the Star on Sunday. “That’s where we were headed when the whole McArthur events came very much to the fore. There’s no question it created a very difficult, complex situation and at that stage police decided to withdraw their application for this year, on the basis that events had to unfold in a certain way and some of that work that was being done had to continue.
“I confirmed as recently as this morning that those discussions are ongoing and will continue to be ongoing, with the objective remaining the same. Which is to have police back in the parade on whatever basis everyone works out as soon as possible.”
There’s no denying the combative, hostile history between the gay community and policing. The city has come a long way, with Bill Blair becoming the first police chief to march in the Pride Parade, in 2005.
But the murders of gay men, and the deficient investigation into missing gay men, first time around, has set back relations with police. Can’t straighten it out on quick-step deadline.
So some participants wore black patches and eye-black to remember the victims, although the sideways detour into mourning felt like a dissonant footnote and I don’t think many in the huge crowd of revellers even grasped it.
It provided cover, however, for incoming Premier Doug Ford, who did not attend, saying he would have considered it only if cops were welcome. The Fords don’t do gay. Outgoing premier Kathleen Wynne, long an out lesbian, was given a standing ovation at the church service, accompanied by her partner and her son.
“People have said, ‘Do we need to continue to have Pride, is that time not gone?’ I would say even more than ever. There are lots of forces that want to divide people, want to separate us, that it’s even more important that we’re vigilant right now. We can’t forget that the inclusion and the acceptance that we experience in Downtown Toronto — which isn’t complete but it’s pretty good – is not the experience of everyone across the province, across the country and across the world.”
In 72 countries, homosexuality remains illegal. Eight countries still have the death penalty for simply being gay.
Ford’s absence sent an ugly message.
“The presence at one event or another is kind of beside the point,” Wynne told the Star. “I think that if you are an elected official in Ontario and you are beholden to people who are homophobic or who are racist, bigoted, that’s the real problem. It’s more about, what do you believe? Do you believe that everyone should be treated equally?
“That’s the important question.”
Doug Ford and his tribal nation seem to have answered it.
They won’t genuflect out of common courtesy either.